Re: Fedora 11 nerfed my mixer

On Sun, 2009-04-26 at 17:43 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> Yes, there will always be missing entries in the DB. The same way as
> there always will be missing quirks in the kernel driver. That's
> something we need to accept. But there is no need to conclude from
> that that it is necessary to expose the full alsa mixer all the
> time --
Absolutely. I don't think anyone would suggest that we want to expose
the full alsa mixer all the time. That would be horrid. Did anyone
suggest that?
> the same way it is not necessary to install gcc, patch, git
> and the kernel sources just because the kernel drivers might need
> quirks, too.
I think that's a good analogy. We don't just declare use cases to be
uninteresting and refuse to support them in the kernel -- we add quirks,
so the user can make things work properly. The user retains full
control.
We should be allowing the user to retain full control of the mixer too
-- they definitely shouldn't need to use it in the _default_ case, but
there should be _some_ way for them to fix things when we don't get it
right. Preferably in such a way that we can learn from what they've
done, improve our database and get it right for similar machines in the
future.
I don't think we achieve that by throwing our toys out of the pram and
refusing to contemplate the notion of letting the user fix things
through the panel applet or the tool they can launch from it.
It sucks that we're forcing the user to go through the application menus
to find an alternative, when there ought to be some kind of quirk or
"stuff isn't working right!" button or menu or something in the place
the user will actually be _looking_.
--
David Woodhouse Open Source Technology Centre
David Woodhouse intel com Intel Corporation